Coupes de Grace

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

Deep down, we all have secrets that ignite quivers of guilt within our guts. Mine probably dates back to around 1968. That was when we were cruising along the New Jersey Turnpike and there, off the northbound lanes near Exit 8 in Hightstown, atop a berm of bulldozed dirt, was a dead-stock 1937 Ford coupe. Painted red and white. Sitting there atop the mound, lettered as a billboard for East Windsor Speedway, which was located just off Exit 8. Needless to say, it didn't take Dad and me long to get there and check things out. From there, it was on to another local race track, the famed Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania. It was the outset of a lifetime interest I've had in local short-track racing, but that's not the point here. What's more important is that in most cases back then, Modifieds and Sportsmen, as they were called in the Northeast, generally wore 1930s steel as their bodywork.
There's an important historical reason why. Back in the 1930s, when local short tracks first evolved as a phenomenon in racing, the car of choice was the Midget, whose own origins can be traced back to about 1934. Originally, Midgets were home built cars, with engines as diverse as Elto outboards for small boats, Harley-Davidson twins, Crosleys and Ford's 60hp flathead V-8. It was good, affordable competition, and Midget racing absolutely exploded. In New Jersey, to cite only one example, there were literally scores of places where the little cars did battle, from armory floors to tiny speedways like the Nutley Velodrome and Hinchcliffe Stadium. Then, in time for the end of World War II, a 110-cu.in. version of the twin-cam Offenhauser engine was developed specifically for Midget racing, and the great Frank Kurtis began building exquisitely crafted Midgets for customers at his shop in Glendale, California. All of a sudden, the bar of competitiveness was almost out of sight, and winning in the Midgets became a very costly proposition.
Just about then, the civilian auto industry resumed production, touching off a frenzy to buy new cars among just about everyone who could afford one. People who'd been holding on to their pre-war cars out of necessity now couldn't stuff them into junkyards fast enough. Instead, some track promoter whose identity is long since lost to history decided to start stuffing them into one another. It was a ton easier to fill a pit with stock cars after the war than with Midgets, plus the fans loved the beating and banging. The Midgets were shoved to the periphery of racing, where they largely remain. As stock cars evolved into Modifieds, with ever-bigger OHV V-8s replacing the eternal flatheads, the coupe and coach bodies endured, only getting more and more chopped as time progressed. By the way, in New England, this progression continued until the cars were known as Cut-Downs. In central Pennsylvania, the same process turned them into Bugs, which eventually morphed into Sprint cars. There's a good book out recently that examines the West Coast version of this tale, Memories of the California Jalopy Association, by Thomas D. Luce.
For me, and others, the spectacle of the radically sliced-and-diced, overpowered Modifieds crabbed sideways and throwing dirt everywhere was electrifying. At the time, I had no idea I would one day work for a magazine whose readers are probably horrified by the prospect of worthy parts cars, or in many cases, restoration candidates, being crunched into oblivion on oval tracks across the country. Legend has it that one famous New Jersey car owner named Lucky Jordan, whose crestfallen driver had wiped out his Modified and its 1937 Ford sedan body, raided every junkyard he could find, bought something like a dozen flat-back Ford bodies, and then told his driver, essentially, "Crash them all." For a long time, even after their powertrains and chassis had evolved to 1960s specifications, most short-track stock cars, at least in the Northeast, had 1930s bodywork. From an identity standpoint, for many years, if it wasn't a coupe or a coach, it simply wasn't a Modified. That mindset persisted until about 1970, or maybe a couple of years thereafter, when the salvage yards simply started running out of vintage tin in any kind of shape. That forced the racers to adopt late-model sheetmetal whether they wanted to or not, and from what I could tell, most didn't.
The Modified thus became an open-wheel stock car with shortened, narrowed bodywork sliced from a Ford Mustang, Ford Falcon or AMC Gremlin, with first-generation Plymouth Valiants and Corvairs that had received the Ronco Veg-O-Matic treatment also being popular in some quarters. Today, the Northeast-based Modified is a kit car. You order a catalog from a builder like Bicknell, TEO Pro Car or Troyer and take it from there. The body panels are sheets of cut-to-fit aluminum. You don't see race teams nowadays rooting through scrap yards looking for derelict Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais or Dodge Diplomat bodies to sacrifice on the altar of bullring speed, as a result.
Unless you followed the Modifieds yourself, you may not be aware that there's a ton of nostalgia for the old ones today, with the pre-war bodies, abetted by a bunch of historic racing groups and Web sites. When I see one that's improbably survived and been restored, I feel some sadness at all the ones that didn't, and believe me, over the years, they numbered in the thousands. Cars like 1937 Fords, 1936 Chevrolets and 1938 Plymouths weren't targeted for racing duty because they were aesthetically pure or even intrinsically durable. They got turned into cannon fodder because they were there, period, and could be had on the cheap. It's too late now, but I'm sorry today that so many good old American cars got chewed up without even a thought to their significance. At least the Bicknells, et al, should ensure that it never happens again.
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This article originally appeared in the June, 2007 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.